


A Witch's Best Friend

by sweetdreamsaremadeoffish



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/F, How Much Fluff Could a Fluff Fic Fit if a Fluff Fic Could Fit Fluff?, It'd Fit as Much as a Fluff Fic Could if a Fluff Fic Could Fit Fluff, Light Angst, Lilith Wants in on That Business, The Spellmans are a Soft Family, because Zelda's an angsty bean no matter where you put her, it's ridiculously fluffy, magic shenanigans, that's what I'm saying, which is this amount of fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-07 07:13:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18615724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetdreamsaremadeoffish/pseuds/sweetdreamsaremadeoffish
Summary: They are morticians. They need all the joy they can get.





	A Witch's Best Friend

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, I know I already posted today, and this is the furthest from the new chapter of phoenix anything could ever be, but this idea came to me rather suddenly, and it was absolutely vital that I write it _immediately_.
> 
>    
> Not carefully proofread, the whole thing’s a mess, and the title’s cheesy, but just trust me, guys.  
>    
>    
> Set somewhere between the Exorcism and the end of part one, but also, like, an AU?  
> 

Zelda, vain creature she is, insists on eight hours uninterrupted beauty sleep nightly. They’d kept each other up rather late, so it came to pass that Lilith was wandering through the Spellman house unsupervised. The woman was prideful to a fault, but she also had a voracious appetite when it came to her lover’s attention and affection. So when her bored whining and sulking for the better part of an hour failed to rouse Zelda and resulted in the flinging of a pillow in her general direction, Lilith left in a huff, searching for someone who _would_ notice her.

She finds Hilda in the kitchen, puttering about preparing breakfast for her family. The younger Spellman sister beams when she catches sight of Lilith in the doorway.

“Good morning, love,” she chirps, the kettle just beginning to whistle on the stove behind her.

“And to you, Sister Spellman.” Lilith leans against the minty green cabinets, preening in the wash of sunlight shining through the kitchen window.

Hilda scoffs. “Oh, come off it, Mary, you’re practically family. Call me Hilda.”

Family. The word leaves a strange taste in Lilith’s mouth. Unfamiliar, but not unpleasant. She decides to like it. “Good morning, Hilda, then.” Awkward, certainly. She’ll need more practice.

Hilda chuckles, a sincere, sugary sound that rumbles from the core of her. She turns around to pour their morning tea, Zelda’s tiny white cup and saucer set apart for the addition of Hilda’s discreet draught for her sister’s blood pressure. Innocent and cherubic as Hildegard might appear, Lilith has found her to be subtly strong-willed and powerful. In some ways, more so than her own sweet Zelda. The demoness has taken an unprecedented liking to the witch.

And she pities the fool who underestimates her.

Tongue peeking out from the corner of her mouth with the effort of balancing them, Hilda transfers the rest of the teacups to the table with care and tilts her head toward the drawer at Lilith’s hip.

“Would you mind helping to set the table, dear?”

Her eyebrows fly up in mild amusement. The first of women, witches, and wives, the mother of demons, the dawn of doom, until recently, concubine to the Dark Lord Satan himself.

Set out silverware?

She should laugh and traipse into the astral plane or enchant the plants lining the windowsill to burst from their little clay pots like fairytale beanstalks or, at the very least, summon one of her children to do it for her, knocking the witch back into her place with the shock of it.

But instead, she pulls at the worn copper handle with a sigh and starts counting out forks. Hilda’s appreciative smile moves something cold and hard in her chest. Zelda does it too, when she flitters those playful butterfly kisses on her cheeks or takes her hand while they walk side by side in the Greendale wood at dusk.

And there’s that word again: Family.

Lilith circles the table, placing one of each utensil at each seat. She runs her free hand over the back of the bench she shares with Zelda when the Spellman clan is convened in full. It used to belong to Ambrose, seeing as the boy obviously struggles with sitting correctly in a chair, always some limb or another in some place or position it’s not quite supposed to be. He grieved the furniture exchange that morning after she’d first stayed the night, begrudging her offer of truce for nearly a week. Then he looked up from the droning dullness of his cereal—where he seemed to collect his deepest resentments—and caught her feeding Zelda one of the scrumptious wild strawberries they’d picked that afternoon, all laughing blue eyes and gentle, doting fingertips. After that, he forgave her trepasses and made it his mission to draw out one of her infamously rare, non-Zeldaic laughs with the increasingly improbable—and occasionally, impossible—contortions he performed with his chair at each meal.

She’s aligning his spoon with an uncharacteristic fondness when she sees it.

Knives and napkins tumble to the floor in a flurry of clanging. Hilda looks up, alarmed, from the eggs she’s scrambling.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” She’s at Lilith’s side in an instant, a hand on her arm ready to comfort her, whatever the cause of her distress might be. Lilith bites back loving her for it.

“What is that?” she asks, and Hilda follows her unsettled stare to the thing in the basket. She relaxes immediately.

“Oh, that’s Tom.” Lilith turns to her incredulously, keeping the worrisome thing well within the periphery of her vision.

“Tom?”

“Vinegar Tom, yes. He’s… was Zelda’s familiar,” Hilda explains carefully. Lilith blinks.

“And she _stuffed_ him?” She has to be kidding. Nights soaked in sweat for all the wrong reasons have taught her Zelda’s brokenness time and time again, but this is just absurd.

“Well, we are morticians, love,” Hilda teases. The look of disbelief across Lilith’s borrowed face sobers her. “They were very close, you see, Tom and Zelds. And when he died… It was just after our parents had passed, and Edward was away, studying to become the coven’s High Priest,” Hilda pauses, contemplative as she empties the residual water from the kettle into the sink, sending up a sudden cloud of steam to match the breaking mist outside, “I guess the house just felt too big, and letting him go meant being alone. Zelda’s never been good at it. Either, actually. Letting go or being alone. Loneliness, sure, but she’s always lonely with someone nearby. So, she held onto him, and then after a while, I think, she grew into the house—having Ambrose and Sabrina livened up the place, you know—but then the world started feeling a bit too big. And there he is in his basket, thirty years later,” Hilda sighs, and Lilith wonders if perhaps the Spellman family optimist is more tired and sad than she lets on.

One thing at a time. Though that’s never the way with these hell forsaken witches, is it? They’re inundated with things all day, every day, or so it seems.

Well, maybe if she can manage one of their longstanding things, the daily ones will run a bit smoother. Or, at the very least, have a little more joy in them.

As Hilda said, they are morticians. They need all the joy they can get.

 

 

There’s a tongue lapping at Zelda’s cheek. She swats at it groggily and rolls over, burying her face in her satin pillowcase.

But it’s back, persistent as quagmire.

“Later,” she yawns, shooing the offender with a wave of her hand.

Another lick and saliva drips down the side of her neck, far too warm and thick. That’s the final straw. “Mary, I swear to-”

A bark. Short and sharp and achingly familiar. But it can’t be. She’s afraid to open her eyes, afraid of what she’ll find. Or rather, what will be missing, Another bark, but this one leaves words ringing in her ears.

_Fear not, Mistress. I am no delusion. I yet live._

The darling, gruff voice of her familiar floods her senses for the first time in three long, lonely decades, and when she opens her eyes, she sees him through tears. “Tom.”

His nose is gloriously wet as he nuzzles the base of her neck, tail wagging happily. She revels in scratching his ears and lifts him into her arms. He curls against her, fur silky and soft on her skin. “I’ve missed you,” she confesses as she rises from bed, her familiar clutched safely to her chest.

_And I you, Lady Spellman. And I you._

They whisper to one another, souls rejoined, as she carries him downstairs.

Who can deny her methods now? Her dearest friend has finally returned just as she had assured her sister he would. Abandonment and unspoken goodbyes have never been their way. This, though, this sacred entente, woven from their shared history and intrinsic, unbreakable bond, this has tied them together since she was hardly a woman, or, for that matter, a witch.

When the Kemper boy’s iguana had appeared upon his casket, she had told her nephew killing the creature was kinder than keeping it, that a life alone was a pain worse than death.

It was just as true of severed witches as it was of severed spirits. She’d adapted out of necessity to the crushing loneliness that was life without Tom, often without even realizing it. Her family, her people, needed her often, and with Sabrina’s arrival, she’d found a similar connection. The same glimmer of dependence lit the infant’s eyes, but lately, as her niece built herself anew, she was growing beyond the confines of Zelda’s care, and the emptiness at the heart of her gained a fresh sting.

She turns the corner to enter the kitchen, and there is her messy, magical family.

Ambrose is up to his usual antics, a slice of Hilda’s vegan bacon held precariously across his upper lip by power of will. (And a little trick of levitation.) Sabrina is laughing, either at how ridiculous her cousin is or something Hilda’s just told her. The Spellmans are a raucous bunch, and it’s Mary, stretched out on her side of their bench with legs elegantly crossed and a knowing smirk playing at her lips, who sees her first.

She joins them, keeping Tom close until she’s settled, and he can lay across her lap, his head on Mary’s knee. Zelda leans over to press a kiss to Mary’s cheek and lingers there for a moment, looking down at her familiar.

“I think he likes you,” she purrs into her girlfriend’s ear, feeling the shift in her face with the smile it breeds.

Sabrina and Ambrose notice Vinegar Tom then and pepper Zelda with questions she honestly can’t answer, leaving Lilith and Tom himself to their own devices. The familiar knows dark, cautionary tale of Lilith. But he also knows that her magic resurrected him. He can feel it beating in his veins. That, with the way she looks at his mistress like she’s a universe in her own right, convinces him she must be more than what the ethereal tales would have him believe.

They lock eyes in the midst of it all, and they make a silent pact:

Between the two of them, Zelda Spellman will never have to be alone or lonely again.

**Author's Note:**

> Let's have a good cry about it in the comments section?
> 
> Reread your favorite book, text/email that old friend you keep forgetting to reach out to, and hydrate, kids.
> 
> Love, Ruby


End file.
